(novels, 1954–55)
Most novelists would be satisfied with creating a well-written story containing strong characters and an intriguing plot, but J. R. R. Tolkien managed to do something more, something rarely accomplished by any writer: he created an entire alternate universe. And it is a universe that countless readers have embraced and returned to, time and again. Perhaps that is why The Lord of the Rings series has topped several polls for the most popular books of the twentieth century.
The Lord of the Rings series is, in one sense, the ultimate road trip; the story of a journey through perilous lands in search of a ring of unimaginable power that must be destroyed in order to defeat the dark powers of evil and finally restore peace to Middle Earth (Tolkien’s name for his alternative world). Its pages are crammed with adventure, humor, moments of heart-stopping terror, and all the little fascinating details that bring the stories to life. As a tale of wonder and heroism, it stands without equal in its genre, and much of its charm comes from the nature of its protagonists. Frodo, and Bilbo before him, are not heroic by nature, but the root of their courage is their love of their friends, their loyalty to their home (the Shire), and their defense of a simple, ordinary life. Theirs is a heroism of mercy, for it is only due to Frodo’s compassion toward Gollum at so many junctures along the way that their quest is successful in the end.
The Lord of the Rings series is also a parable about the danger of the misuse of power, with its central object of desire being a ring that can be used to dominate others. Because Tolkien published the books in the postwar era, many readers have tried to connect the ring with the looming threat of atomic warfare. Though this creates an interesting reading, Tolkien himself dismissed such musings by saying that he just wanted to tell a good story. And he did.
Tolkien was a lifelong student of Norse mythology and Arthurian legend. These tales, along with the biblical story of Christ’s sacrificial triumph over evil, were the materials he used to shape a mythology all his own in The Lord of the Rings. The resulting vision includes traces of all these influences, but they combine to form a unique invention of his own imagination. The world he created in this trilogy is full of enough intricate details to keep obsessive fans busy debating all its minutiae, including the several languages spoken by the different “races” in the books, each of them with its own vocabulary and grammar. Tolkien even provided maps and invented histories to flesh out his created world. Many years after his death, these books also spawned a tremendously popular series of films that have helped keep interest alive, although most readers of the books find the films only a shadow of the riches contained in Tolkien’s originals.
“God is the lord of angels and of men,” wrote Tolkien, “and of elves.”1 In his trilogy and its prequels (The Hobbit [1939] and The Silmarillion [1977]) he has placed these elves, along with sundry wizards, hobbits, dwarves, and other strange creatures, at the center of his storytelling. Yet behind the scenes of his tale there lurks a power of ultimate goodness, a reservoir of strength and courage that gives his unlikely heroes the ability to defeat the darkest powers of evil. Though never mentioned by name, God is very much a character in Tolkien’s trilogy. The books, while thoroughly enjoyable as a prime example of the fantasy genre, cannot be fully understood apart from Tolkien’s Christian worldview, for this is not a world operating by impersonal fate, as in the Norse myths he so loved, but a world where God’s providence assures the eventual victory of good over evil, though not without much struggle and sacrifice.
Tolkien used the world of fantasy to shine an illuminating light on the ultimate questions of life, a light that can awaken readers from their own spiritual slumber. By recasting the ageless theological themes of providence, sacrifice, and virtue into a new and unfamiliar world, Tolkien gave us a fresh perspective from which to view our own lives. As he once wrote, “I would claim . . . to have as one object the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in the real world by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar embodiments, that tend to ‘bring them home.’ ”2 All who have made the journey with Frodo and his friends know the reality of this experience. And Tolkien’s books are filled with moments of breathtaking mystery and wonder where we see a supernatural reality shining through.
One of the strengths of Tolkien’s writing is that he can awaken a sense of spiritual longing without tipping his hand in regard to his personal convictions. Perhaps that is why so many readers who do not share Tolkien’s faith can still count The Lord of the Rings series among their favorite books. It does not threaten, it enchants, creating a longing for a better world. It woos us with a story well told and a vision of beauty and true goodness. Instead of relying on allegorical symbols, he chose to create a world constructed around the values of honor, strength, courage, and the existence of a benevolent Creator. Tolkien himself described The Lord of the Rings series as a “fundamentally religious” work. “That is why,” he wrote, “I have not put in anything like religion . . . in the imaginary world. For religion is absorbed in the story and the symbolism.”3 The story that Tolkien tells is a mirror of the Christian story of redemption, a story he calls the euchatastrophe, the sudden and miraculous incursion of grace into the world that averts a seeming disaster. “The magical,” he proposed in an essay on fairy tales, “may be made a vehicle for mystery.”4
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in South Africa in 1892 when his British father was relocated there by the company he worked for. Two years later his mother, Mabel, moved with her sons back to England because of the serious health issues with which young Ronald was struggling. Their father was to follow them before long, but he died in South Africa.
In 1900 Tolkien’s mother was confirmed in the Catholic church, much to the dismay of her Protestant family, but she died when he was only twelve, and he and his brother were left in the care of a priest, Father Francis Morgan. Morgan was a conservative and unsentimental Catholic whose effect on Tolkien’s own growth in faith cannot be underestimated. Morgan helped him with his studies and prepared him for a successful academic career in Oxford, which was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I.
While serving as a soldier (many of the scenes of fighting and devastation in The Lord of the Rings are undoubtedly rooted in horrors he had experienced in WWI), Tolkien carried on his interest in philology. He had been fascinated with languages even as a boy, and he now spent his spare time between battles creating entirely original languages of his own fashioning. Then, in order to give the languages a history (for every language is rooted in its history), he began to create mythical-historical backstories for them. This was the beginning of his lifelong process of fleshing out an entire mythology of his own making. The fruits of this endeavor include The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and various other collections of related tales. So vast was the mountain of papers involved in this project that, following Tolkien’s death, his son Christopher gathered and edited them into a series of volumes that contained his further inventions concerning Middle Earth.
In an explanatory letter, Tolkien revealed the origins of his mythology, and their connection with his love for England:
I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up in its tongue and style), not of the quality I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. . . . I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy story—the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendor from the vast backclothes—which I could dedicate simply: to England: to my country.5
The author of these widely imaginative fantasy stories was also an esteemed professor at Oxford and a close friend of C. S. Lewis, participating with Lewis and others in the famous “Inklings” meetings where they read and discussed each other’s work over pipes and mugs of ale. Unlike Lewis and other Christian colleagues, Tolkien rarely wrote directly about his Christian faith. But he was known to his friends as a man of prayer, one who took his beliefs very seriously, and one born into the faith who never saw a good reason to look elsewhere for the truth.
J. R. R. Tolkien distinguished what he did in his writing from the act of creation. Any good story, he believed, was not a creation, but a “sub-creation,” his term for a story formed by rearranging the elements of the world that God created. To the end of his days he worked on his own Middle Earth sub-creation, continuing to fashion a universe that reflected the one written by the hand of the great Author and Creator of all.